As we end 2023, I want to discuss doubt, one of the great drivers of my faith.
One might say that doubt is the opposite of faith, the absence of faith in fact. I thought this in my teenage years and believed with an abandon that grew from both invention and tradition. I grew up with an expectation of faith, that my belief would always permeate my life and that there would always be wonders unseen which I could aspire to know through faith. In high school we were often told that our faith would diminish as adults and that our worldview would shift as we moved further away from the secure halls of our younger years where belief was fostered through frequent prayers and service.
For much of my adult life I’ve taken that warning as a challenge and maintained my belief just as I’ve maintained my optimism. The faith that I developed became thus far less performative and far more innate. It was a faith drawn to seeking the goodness in people and ideas more so than proclaiming my beliefs out loud for all to hear. In fact, I tend to view less serious if equally personal devotions as more worthy of public adulation, my passion for the Chicago Cubs being chief among these causes. While not hiding the light of my faith I have still let it retreat more into private spaces where it could continue to grow.
In the last decade I’ve also come to doubt a great many things. The commanding voice of faith which we hear in public, trumpeted as it often is from a position of great authority, often feels hollow to me. I hear the words spoken and think of the actions that same voice takes, and of the limits they place on our society to accept the goodness of all, and I am left feeling evermore jaded and unwilling to play along. I am certainly not the same person I was a decade ago, like all things I have changed with the passing of time. Both faith and doubt have their place in this decade, both gave me their shared wisdom to find my place in their midst, and I feel affirmed in my beliefs because of it.
I have long believed in my own ability to do anything I set my mind to; there’s a part of me deep down that still hasn’t quite given up on my childhood dream to pitch for the Cubs even though I’ve hardly ever shown any athletic talent whatsoever (except for one day in 6th Grade.) This part of me is what convinced me to pursue a left field idea of broadening the teaching section of my C.V., yet in that effort I found my limits to be resolute. I sit here now, at the end of 2023 looking back on that storm which overtook my life in August exhausted by my efforts and feeling drained of all the passion I poured into that project.
Do I now doubt my abilities to broaden my horizons? I’m not sure. I’ve wondered for many years now what people meant when they described how promising youths grew into adults stuck in a current of nostalgia incapable of achieving that promise which with maturity they ought to have grown into. I see what they meant now, it’s a pool like the ones in the Ozarks that I canoed past as a Boy Scout in the first decade of this century. I could well lean in and let that pool consume me, right now I’d rather rest than carry on, yet as always, I have far too much to look forward to in the coming year to give up now. I promised myself many years ago that I would not give up, that I would not let myself fail at making something of my life, and if anything, my doubt has made that resolve only strengthen and grow.
I don’t like to brag, it’s one of those central parts of my upbringing that I’ve hung onto all these years in spite of everything the world has thrown at me. Still, I have accomplished a good deal over these past three-plus decades. In my four high school years alone, the years when I discovered my writer’s voice, I wrote fourteen plays and even dabbled with choral and orchestral composition. In my adult years I’ve branched out and written constantly. Perhaps my greatest accomplishment to date is that I’ve learned to pace myself, to write bits at a time and trust that I will find the energy to finish what I’ve started, even if isn’t in the same day, week, month, or year. The sequel to my novel Erasmus Plumwood is one such project that I started in 2019 and still have tucked away in my computer’s files and in the back of my mind. I know how Plum in the Sun is going to go, and how it will end, I’ve just been waiting now for four years for the right mood to write the next chapter which is so joyous in its tone that it needs an exuberant mind filled with childlike joy to write it.
When I started writing the Wednesday Blog, I didn’t figure it’d run for very long. Either through embarrassment or frustration or boredom I figured it’d be something I write for a few months, maybe a year, and that would be that. I’ve been keeping a running tally of these posts in a document called “Wednesday Blog Full Text” since I started it, with the pre-podcast posts and each season of the podcast as an individual book within the whole collection. What you are reading, or listening to, now is Chapter 30 of Book 4. The greatest trial of endurance for the Wednesday Blog came in these last few months when I barely had the time to write it or record it amid a constant, pulsating, Shostakovichian work schedule. Like the 4th movement of that Russian composer’s 5th Symphony, I came to feel as though the life within my body was holding on rather than directing the machinery of my days. Seeing my place to exit that brief phase of my life, and finally creating the time to rest during this Christmas season is something I am more convinced is the right thing than most other things I’ve yet done.Do I still doubt that I’m making the right decision today? Absolutely, I embrace the ever present doubts of my mind, for they will right my path amid all the bucolic and proud visions which will come to pass. Yet at least for this moment, writing now at the end of December at the end of 2023 and at the beginning of this next year in my life, I know I made a choice that was right for me.
Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane 